Saturday, May 22, 2010

SATURDAY NIGHT THE SUNDAYS, THE CHILLS, K.D. LANG, LUKA BLOOM.

The Sundays' 1990 debut album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic contained the fine single Here's where the story ends. They formed in Bristol, UK, in 1988 or so. Singer's Harriet Wheeler.






The Chills hail from New Zealand. Heavenly Pop Hit is from the album Submarine Bells (1990).





Constant Craving, a memorable hit (1992) from Kathryn Dawn Lang (artist name K.D. Lang), a Canadian singer-songwriter. The Prize for Homophobic Comment of the Day goes to the infidel bastard Outlaw Mike from Belgistan for daring to say that he understands jack sh*t of what she's singing about and does not really want to know.






Somewhere out there there should be a decent studio version of Luka Bloom's Rescue Mission but I couldn't find it. There's two songs. Bail out after Rescue Mission. Guy's from Ireland, Kevin Barry Moore is his real name. Luka comes from Suzanne Vega's song, Bloom's the surname of the main character in James Joyce's Ulysses. The Prize for Hateful Comment of the Day goes once again to the inimitable catholic fundamentalist creep Outlaw Mike from Belgistan for remarking that the namegiving thingy all sounds verrry intellectual.





Not. Nite.



MFBB.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

STEYN AGAIN: "ISLAM? WHAT ISLAM?"

For the umpteenth time, a brilliant jewel of a column by The Master. Mark Steyn in the Orange County Register, May 14, 2010. This guy is so unbelievably good it's no wonder he doesn't get the coverage he deserves.


"What with the Fort Hood mass murderer, the Christmas Pantybomber and now the Times Square Bomber, you may have noticed a little uptick in attempted terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland in the last few months.

Rep. Lamar Smith did, and, at the House Judiciary Committee, he was interested to see if the attorney general of the United States thought there might be any factor in common between these perplexingly diverse incidents.

"In the case of all three attempts in the last year, the terrorist attempts, one of which was successful, those individuals have had ties to radical Islam," said Congressman Smith. "Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?"

"Because of ... ?"

"Radical Islam," repeated Smith.

"There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions," replied Eric Holder noncommittally. "I think you have to look at each individual case."

The congressman tried again. "Yes, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?"

"There are a variety of reasons why people ... ."

"But was radical Islam one of them?"

"There are a variety of reasons why people do things," the attorney general said again. "Some of them are potentially religious ... ."


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Stuff happens. Hard to say why.

"Okay," said Smith. "But all I'm asking is if you think among those variety of reasons radical Islam might have been one of the reasons that the individuals took the steps that they did."

"You see, you say 'radical Islam,'" objected Holder. "I mean, I think those people who espouse a – a version of Islam that is not ... ."

"Are you uncomfortable attributing any actions to radical Islam?" asked Smith. "It sounds like it."

And so on, and so forth. At Fort Hood, Maj. Hasan jumped on a table and gunned down his comrades while screaming, "Allahu Akbar!", which is Arabic for "Nothing to see here" and an early indicator of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Times Square Bomber, we are assured by The Washington Post, CNN and Newsweek, was upset by foreclosure proceedings on his house. Mortgage-related issues. Nothing to do with months of training at a Taliban camp in Waziristan.

Listening to Attorney General Holder, one is tempted to modify Trotsky:

You may not be interested in Islam but Islam is interested in you. Islam smells weakness at the heart of the West. The post-World War II order is dying: The European Union's decision to toss a trillion dollars to prop up a Greek economic model that guarantees terminal insolvency is merely the latest manifestation of the chronic combination of fiscal profligacy and demographic decline in the West at twilight. Islam is already the biggest supplier of new Europeans and new Canadians, and the fastest-growing demographic in the Western world.

Therefore, it thinks it not unreasonable to shape the character of those societies – not by blowing up buildings and airplanes, but by determining the nature of their relationship to Islam.

For example, the very same day that Eric Holder was doing his "Islam? What Islam?" routine at the Capitol, the Organization of the Islamic Conference was tightening its hold on the U.N. Human Rights Council – actually, make that the U.N. "Human Rights" Council. The OIC is the biggest voting bloc at the U.N., and it succeeded in getting its slate of candidates elected to the so-called "human rights" body – among them the Maldives, Qatar, Malaysia, Mauritania and Libya. The last, elected to the HRC by 80 percent of the U.N. membership, is, of course, a famous paragon of human rights, but the other, "moderate" Muslim nations share the view that Islam, in both its theological and political components, should be beyond discussion. And they will support the U.N.'s rapid progress toward, in effect, the imposition of a global apostasy law that removes Islam from public discourse.

Attorney General Holder seems to be operating an advance pilot program of his own, but he's not alone. Also last week, the head of Canada's intelligence service testified to the House of Commons about hundreds of "second- or third-generation Canadians" who are "relatively well integrated" "economically and socially" but who have become so "very very disenchanted" with "the way we want to structure our society" that they have developed "strong links to homelands" that are "in distress."

Homelands such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Hmm. If you're wondering what those countries might have in common, keep wondering. No words beginning with "I-" and ending with "-slam" passed the director's lips. If the head of the Crown's intelligence service has narrowed his concerns about "disenchanted" "second- and third-generations Canadians" to any demographic group in particular, evidently it's classified information and can't be disclosed in public.

The U.N. elections are a big victory for the Organization of the Islamic Conference. By the way, to my liberal friends who say, "Hey, what's the big deal about the Organization of the Islamic Conference? Lighten up, man," try rolling around your tongue the words "Organization of the Christian Conference." Would you be quite so cool with that? Fifty-seven Prime Ministers and Presidents who get together and vote as a bloc in international affairs? Or would that be a theocratic affront to secular sensibilities? The casual acceptance of the phrase "the Muslim world" – ("Mr. Obama's now-famous speech to the Muslim world" – The New York Times) – implicitly defers to the political ambitions of Islam. And, if there is a "Muslim world," what are its boundaries? Forty years ago, the OIC began with mainly Middle Eastern members plus Indonesia and a couple more. By the Nineties, former Soviet Central Asia had signed on, plus Albania, Mozambique, Guyana and various others. In 2005, Russia was admitted to "observer" membership.

But along with the big headline victories go smaller ones. These days, Islam doesn't even have to show up. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has quietly pulled representations of Mohammed from its Islamic collection.

With the Danish cartoons, violent mobs actually had to kill large numbers of people before Kurt Westegaard was sent into involuntary "retirement." Even with "South Park," the thugs still had to threaten murder. But the Metropolitan Museum caved pre-emptively – no murders, no threats but best to crawl into a fetal position, anyway.

Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians noted that certain, ahem, "immigrant communities" were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo "female genital mutilation." So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They're not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a "ritual nick" to young girls.


FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION NOW OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED IN THE US



A few years back, I thought even fainthearted Western liberals might draw the line at "FGM." After all, it's a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure...."



Sheesh. What an insane world.

Oh yeah. Wanna know something more about Holder? Muffledoar has the goods.

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MFBB.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

MARK STEYN ON THE DISINTEGRATION OF BRITISH DEMOCRACY.

The British elections are over now, and a pseudo rightwinger has become PM. In the runup to the elections, the incomparable Mark Steyn produced this prophetic column. From MacLeans, May 13. "A slow-burn bonfire of liberties":


"...The official “defining moment” of the campaign was Gordon Brown’s unguarded post-photo-op dismissal of Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman.” Mrs. Duffy, a plain-spoken working-class granny and lifelong Labour voter, had made the mistake of asking Mr. Brown, her party leader, a very mild question about immigrants from eastern Europe. He got back in his car and wrote her off, forgetting he was still miked. So she’s a “bigot.” He’s not. That’s why he makes all the decisions for her, and she just makes the best of them. What part of that don’t you understand?

ROY NEWMAN, ALMOST ARRESTED FOR DISPLAYING OFFENSIVE, RACIST COLOURS RED, WHITE AND BLUEThe other “defining moment” got less coverage. Another “pensioner,” 74-year-old Roy Newman, got sick of the various party hacks knocking on his door and put a sign up in his front window: “GET THE LOT OUT.” Ninety minutes later, two police officers arrived at his home to arrest him for “racism.”

Racism? Why, yes. His sign was a piece of white card with red and blue lettering. Red-white-and-blue, geddit? The colours of the Union Jack. If using the same colour scheme as the national flag isn’t coded racism, I don’t know what is. Mr. Newman was prevailed upon to alter some of the letters to yellow, thereby diminishing the racist subtext.

With bigotry and racism running rampant, it was inevitable that homophobia would raise its ugly head. Dale McAlpine, a practising (wait for it) Christian, was handing out leaflets in the town of Workington and chit-chatting with shoppers when he was arrested on a “public order” charge by police officer Sam Adams (no relation), a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community outreach officer. Mr. McAlpine said homosexuality is a sin. “I’m gay,” said Officer Adams. Well, it’s still a sin, said Mr. McAlpine. So Officer Adams arrested him for causing distress to Officer Adams.

In fairness, I should add that Mr. McAlpine was also arrested for causing distress to members of the public more generally, rather than just the aggrieved gay constable. No member of the public actually complained, but, as Officer Adams pointed out, Mr. McAlpine was talking “in a loud voice” that might be “overheard by others.” And we can’t have that, can we? So he was fingerprinted, DNA-sampled and tossed in the cells for seven hours.

The other day, upholding the sacking of a black Christian for declining to provide “sex therapy lessons” to gay couples, Lord Justice Laws ruled that “law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds is irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary.” Actually it’s the law of Lord Justice Laws that is increasingly “irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary.” Or as George Orwell, in Animal Farm, formulated it: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. In the land of Laws, a gay is more equal than a Christian. A Muslim is more equal than anybody. A black man is more equal than a white man, unless the white man is gay and the black man a Christian. An eco-zealot is more equal than an Anglican. Not long before Lord Justice Laws’ decision on the “irrationality” of legal protection for Christianity, Tim Nicholson, a “Head of Sustainability” fired for questioning his property management group’s environmental policies, sued for wrongful dismissal under “Employment Equality (Religion And Beliefs) Regulations.” He wound up with the best part of one hundred thousand pounds after Mr. Justice Burton ruled that Mr. Nicholson’s faith in anthropogenic global warming was a “philosophical belief” on a par with religion. So the Employment Equality (Religion And Beliefs) Law protects belief in apocalyptic “climate change” but not in Jesus.

WAR MEMORIAL DESECRATED BY MUSLIM SCOUNDREL - NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVERAs for Muslims, in December Tohseef Shah sprayed the words “KILL GORDON BROWN,” “OSAMA IS ON HIS WAY” and “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD” on the war memorial at Burton-upon-Trent. But the Crown Prosecution Service decided his words were not “religiously motivated.” Phew! Thank goodness for that, eh? So a week or so back he walked out of court a free man, except for £500 in compensation to the municipal council for cleaning off his non-religiously motivated “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD” graffito.

I am currently slogging my way through a rather stodgy 650-page tome called Extreme Speech And Democracy. On the back is a question from Christopher McCrudden, professor of human rights law at Oxford: “What are the appropriate limits to freedom of expression in societies that wish to be democratic, multicultural, and committed to the human rights of all?”

Whether or not you regard that as a legitimate query, it’s certainly an irrelevant one. Because whatever you decide are the “appropriate” limits, by the time they percolate down to the transgendered liaison officer patrolling Workington shopping centre they’ll be reliably inappropriate. As I always point out in retailing the latest idiocy from Canada’s “human rights” fanatics, none of the above are “right-wing” in any sense that Steyn or Rumsfeld or Cheney would recognize the term. Mrs. Duffy is a lifelong Labour voter; Mr. Newman is one of those pox-on-all-their-houses types; the property company that fired Mr. Nicholson is so wretchedly politically correct it employed him as “Head of Sustainability,” a title of near parodic bogusness. Yet all fell afoul of Lord Justice Laws’ “irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary” laws. Because it’s hard not to. Because once you establish the principle that the state has the right to police ideas, sooner or later one of yours will catch their eye. I say “principle,” but that’s not really the word. The spirit is more aptly caught by a new joint initiative by the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, the Manitoba “Human Rights” Commission and the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba to “promote and enhance the learning experience relative to human and treaty rights for all people living in Canada and around the world.” No idea what that means, but, as the CHRC press release says, this is the first time that these three useless taxpayer-funded sinecures have come together to “further their cause.” Since when do government agencies have ideological “causes”? And what happens if you disagree with their “cause”?

Professor McCrudden’s question on “appropriate” limits is very adroitly formulated: in today’s advanced Western society, there are no absolute rights—for all individual freedoms must be “balanced” against the state’s commitment to “multiculturalism” or “equality” or whatever other modish conceit tickles its fancy. Everybody talks like this now: for Canada’s Chief Censor, Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., freedom of expression is just one menu item in the great Canadian salad bar of rights, so don’t be surprised if we’re occasionally out of stock. Instead, why not try one of our tasty nutritious rights du jour? Like the human right to a transsexual labiaplasty, or (per a recent Quebec ruling) the human right to non-Eurocentric table manners. Real “rights” are restraints upon the state—“negative” rights, as constitutionalists have it; they delineate the limits of the sovereign’s power. But in the modern era “rights” are baubles in the state’s gift, and the sovereign confers them at the expense of individual liberty. Truly, this is an Orwellian assault on the very foundations of freedom.

...

As for the “balancing act” that Professor McCrudden urges between individual rights and broader responsibilities, only a truly free people have the incentive even to seek it. The more you haul nobodies off to the cells for putting up a poster or quoting the Bible, the more a timid conformist populace will keep its head down, mind its own business, and avoid broader social engagement—or at any rate non-alcohol-fuelled engagement. Big Government is dismantling civic identity, and the slow-burn bonfire of liberties in Europe and North America will eventually consume us all."



Yet another must-read that sums it up well. John Derbyshire's transcript of the May 7, Radio Derb broadcast:


"02 — U.K. election. We have a result in the British general election. David Cameron's Conservative Party has won a plurality of seats in Parliament, but not enough to govern firmly. It's hard to get very worked up about this, as the three parties in contention can fairly be described as Left of Center, Center-Left, and Tree-Hugger Left. Certainly there is nothing conservative about David Cameron's Conservatives. It would be very difficult indeed to name anything they wish to conserve: not Britain's ancient demographic core, not the nuclear family, not restraint in public financing, not liberties of speech or assembly, not public respect for the Christian religion, not Britain's traditional wariness of European entanglements, not Britain's traditional warmth towards and co-operation with the old British-settler nations, not civic order and the suppression of crime by fair policing, not respect for rank and authority, not control over the national debt … There is no subject you can name on which Cameron's "Conservatives" wish to conserve any more than Gordon Brown's Laborites, though I'll concede that neither party would call in the U.N. to force a macrobiotic diet on the population, as Nicholas Clegg's Liberal Democrats would. Cameron and Brown may want to make homosexuals a Designated Victim Class, with special rights and privileges, but Clegg's party would make homosexuality compulsory. In this respect, at least, the Brits have dodged a bullet. Frankly, I'm past caring. The old England I grew up in, the England of stoicism and bitter beer and dry humor, the England in which it was bad form to take public affairs too seriously, the England of puddings and bobbies and weird regional accents, of casual snobbery and dim old churches and the smell of soft coal burning, the England of, as George Orwell famously wrote, "old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning" — that England's as dead as the Wild West. It's been replaced by a multicultural bazaar with a feral underclass and a vast, suffocating public sector, neither of which it can any longer afford. The educated classes are sunk deep in ethnomasochism — hatred of their own ancestors, of themselves really. Teenage girls get pregnant and are given public housing and a dole, while married couples struggle to pay their tax bills. The borders are open to foreign agitators who loudly declare their hatred for Britain, while old folk who survived the bombs and shortages of Hitler's war are sneered at as Nazis. When you come home to find burglars have looted your house, don't bother calling the police; they'll just give you an incident number for the insurance company; but try flying the national flag in your front yard — a squad car full of cops will kick your door down and tase you in the living-room for "racism." I couldn't care less about Britain any more. I'm nostalgic for what used to be, but I don't have any illusions any of it is coming back. These smooth-faced managerial types aim only to drag their country further along the road to perdition, with just minor differences in the speed of dragging. I said my goodbyes to England long ago. Let's turn our attention to a place that is still, in spite of some of the same dismal trends, a real country."



Both my wife and I, but especially I, are anglophiles. Long before I met her, I spent biking holidays in Kent and the Lake District, and visited London often. Our honeymoon took us through the south and up north again till Blenheim Palace, where in the village nearby I paid respect to Winston Churchill at the site of the family grave.

But...

... a bunch of insane politicians INCLUDING the so-called Conservatives are DESTROYING the country I loved so much in times past.

I am beginning to feel more and more like a lone Roman legionnaire in a foxhole outside Rome in 410, with a Visigoth army steamrollering toward me up front, and a fornicating and partying drunk bunch of degenerates in my back.



MFBB.


P.S.: the Roy Newman case. They said the Union Jack-coloured lettering on a white background could be considered ‘racist’. He was told there had been a single complaint and he was ordered to remove it or change it otherwise he would end up in court.